Harnassing Web 2.0 To Write A Book: Overview
Web 2.0 offers book authors some remarkable free tools that can be tied together to provide a powerful system for writing and keeping track of book projects. I propose here a strategy, hoping that others on the internet may chip in with discussion, elaborations and improvements.
The strategy has, for the moment, three components:
- a web-based email address, which can send and receive cell phone messages, dedicated to a single book project
- an online word processor with versioning capability
- a software notebook that gathers in one place notes from all types of media
EMAIL ADDRESS: An email address dedicated exclusively to an individual book project offers some intriguing benefits. With a tagging or filing system set up to match aspects of the book, one can write email notes to oneself and organize them into groups according to topic. With the cell phone capability, ideas that pop into one’s head while away from one’s computer can be easily sent to your email account so they don’t get lost. I suggest that the email address somehow contain a reference to your book project, its title, perhaps, or the name of a major character. Gmail or Yahoo Mail will both meet the task; perhaps other email facilities will work just as well.
WORD PROCESSOR: There are several emerging online word processors which can be especially helpful to book authors. I already looked at Writewith, Zoho Writer and Google Docs. They all keep track of evolving versions of each document, but they also have some subtle but important differences. Currently, I personally rank them in the order above, but that may change as I gather more experience.
Writewith and Google Docs both ask for an email address as your username. Ah ha — the new email account, of course! That automatically gives you an account which also will be dedicated to a single book project.
These word processor accounts can, of course, handle multiple documents. Each one, in this strategy, will be a separate chapter. Now you can see and have immediate access to all of your chapter files at a single glance. And for each chapter, you will have all of the chapter versions as you progress, allowing you to roll back to an earlier version if you need to.
These word processors also allow you to compare versions so that you can easily spot the differences. By default, the documents are listed in the order in which you last worked on them. Zoho Writer allows three options, the most useful being alphanumeric, which allows you to place a number at the beginning of the file name forcing the documents into the sequence in your book. As these competing processors evolve, maybe they will all allow such organization.
The online programs differ in how one can assign tasks, make reminder notes and the such. Writewith, at the moment, is the most powerful in this regard.
SOFTWARE NOTEBOOK: These software programs are quite new and are still very much under development. They have evolved from the cut-and-paste scrapbook programs of a year ago, which allowed a writer to gather snippets of research from the web. The more robust versions of today allow the writer to through almost every imaginable kind of information into a notebook, text notes, html clips, jpg’s, video, etc. They are very helpful tools to help writers keep track of all the background information relevant to a book project.
Corel Lightning, currently in limited beta, resides on one’s computer, while brand new arrival Zoho Notebook keeps its files online. Writers will want to monitor developments in this sphere.
I would add here too one of my favorite organizational tools, though it is not new: Keynote. This program is based on the hierarchical tree metaphor and works beautifully as an outliner and notes organizer. It also allows numerous related outlines within the same file, all accessible via tabs along the top.
THESE THREE ELEMENTS provide authors with a powerful arsenal of tools, all amazingly free, which will be immensely helpful in undertaking a major book project.
I hope that other netizens will offer their own observations about this strategy. I only devised it last night, and I’m still playing around with finding the best way to implement it.
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Hi,
Thanks for mentioning writewith! We originally designed for the needs of a newsroom. As you use the application, be sure to tell us more about how we could make it work better for books.
Thanks,
Eric